I thought that fermions couldn't occupy the same point in spacetime. I can see the problems with electron/anti-electron and proton/anti-proton, since they have opposite charges, but what about neutron/anti-neutron ? How do they annihilate? Do they temporarily "decay", so that the products then annihilate each other?? Also, what is a wavelength in this context? The de Broglie wavelength? But of what? The molecule as a whole? Some electron within the molecule? Etc., etc. At 08:38 AM 11/13/2011, Mike Stay wrote:

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 8:23 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

...

I've asked the following sort of question before on math-fun:

I realize that matter annihilates antimatter when they come into 'contact', but what is 'contact' in this context, and what are the time sequence details -- e.g., when a molecule of glucose 'contacts' a molecule of anti-glucose ?

Contact is occupying the same point in spacetime (to within a wavelength). -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com